The Function of Literature

One difficulty of teaching literature that quickly becomes evident at the High School level, and, I suspect, at any level, is that the world depends of resistance. Allow me to elaborate. To make a sound, air passes over vocal chords that resist. Instruments operate on the same basic principal. Movement, writing, pretty much anything requires something to provide resistance in order to facilitate its motion, some standard to move against. Most literature enacts some kind of social criticism. An author writes a story and points out elements of a society that are unjust, absurd, or otherwise distasteful, pointing out human foibles, the human condition of struggle, what have you. To understand the message of a given text, however, requires a standard to measure the meaning of the story. Most school age readers are using stimuli from the outside world, movies, tv, stories, music, to build, formulate, and fine tune their understanding of "the way the world ought to be" or "how I ought to live." But literature assumes either some internalized moral compass, or at least an understanding of some moral standard in existence out in the world, whether it's a simple truth like "life is precious" or something more complex. The problem is that so many of us, especially at a younger age, lack that sense of an established standard. For some it's a hurdle just to decode a text and arrive at basic comprehension. Even as much contemporary literature criticizes oppressive social standards, decries the stifled individual conscience over against group norms (as I tend to myself), the creation and interpretation of literature depends on some kind of awareness of a deeper standard or law that society is violating. The democratization of information makes some coherent moral seem all the more difficult. This would seem to suggest an increasing moral morass, a decay at society's core, some kind of collective moral disorientation. And yet, it is fascinating that, in general, many educators and others who work with youth today seem to think that, by and large our youth are more respectful, more generous, and kinder than their own generation. In the broader populace, as ever, people tend to idealize their own generation or the previous generation, and criticize the youth and culture in general for their moral shortcomings. If in fact, the younger generation is kinder, somehow, by nature, even as the ability to evaluate the actions of others in, say, literature, I'm wondering how to account for this.

The Songwriting of Joe Henry

About a decade ago I interned at an Arts Journal called Image. Also about a decade ago I had two little albums called Fuse and Trampoline in constant rotation. So kudos to Image for finally interviewing one of America's best songwriter/producers, Joe Henry (click here for the interview). He touches on something that could also be said of Dylan's songwriting. It's the idea of leaving gaps in the song, room for the imagination to play, to fill in the gaps imaginatively and thereby co-construct the song. This is the very act of manifesting mystery. There is a given world. We are also. Within this little space we get to imaginatively co-create and fill in the gaps left out of the fabric of Being. In his best songwriting, Henry crystallizes and compresses this very act. He says as much in the interview:

"It is of paramount importance to me to walk on the wire where songs are both specific enough—emotionally and in their imagery—to invite you in, yet with enough prevailing mystery intact to keep you from ever feeling like the song can’t continue to provoke revelation. If a song is a house, the writer needs to leave enough doors and windows open that listeners can come and go freely. As soon as you nail an idea to the floor and start directing the flow of traffic, the house has become a museum and a relic, not a living space: you can peek in, but you’re not allowed to lie on Mark Twain’s bed or touch his pencils."

Since Image is the Journal of Religion and the Arts, I'll add that Henry articulates right here the distance between art and the church as I experience it in the phrase "nailing an experience to the floor." The one opens a door, many doors, invites imaginative play, suggests, implies, allows experience to unfold, and meaning to be co-created. The other shuts doors, prepackages meaning, coerces behavior, if only through rigid policing of in-group norms. The fearful attempt to fix meaning in place does some violence to the nature of reality and experience and diminishes vitality.

A line from Henry's song "You Can't Fail Me Now" may help here: "We're taught to love the worst of us / and mercy more than life / But trust me, mercy's just a warning shot across the bow / I live for yours / and you can't fail me now." Ah.

Hm, I wonder if Joe Henry was raised in the church.

Wonderful blog on Joe Henry.
"You Can't Fail Me Now" as NPR's song of the day.
The liner notes to Joe's album Civilians.

Hungerford's Failure to Read McCarthy

One aspect of McCarthy criticism that has become annoying is the claim, especially in regard to the profound violence in Blood Meridian, to have “failed” in reading it. This claim is made in the famous introduction to the Modern Library Edition by none other than the most self-aggrandizing of American literary critics, Harold Bloom. So it is perhaps against this backdrop that all other claims to “fail” reading Blood Meridian are similarly self-aggrandizing. I believe it is poet/critic Christian Wiman (a personal favorite, actually) who makes a similar claim. And I recently stumbled upon the Open Yale Lecture by Amy Hungerford, whose reading of the novel strikes me as a trenchant and willful misreading of the text. Her conclusions are tenuous at best. She stops just short of saying McCarthy is an egomaniac who aspires to supercede all his influences, when in fact he pays homage to his literary antecedents and readily acknowledges them in interviews, whether Melville, Shakespeare, or Faulkner. First, her claim to have failed in her first attempts at reading the novel reek of melodramatic academicese. Failure suggests persistent inability to accomplish something. Obviously, at some point she finished the book. Therefore, this “failure” is blatant hyperbole. It also seems blatantly unoriginal, as if she’s showing off her sophisticated literary sensibility, situating herself with Bloom and others by making this claim. Whether disingenuous or not, it is irksome. Second, it is as if, in her lectures, Hungerford has a predetermined bias against the text and its author. There is no need to prove your sophisticated sensibility. You are a professor of literature at Yale university, not a Victorian schoolteacher. One element McCarthy touches on in the novel is that, at bottom, reality contains conflict, tension, but this is a creative element that gives rise to process and Being, (see Heidegger, Martin), but that we fail to see that reality, instead distorting that creative tension into destructive conflict, war, oppression, exploitation, reducing the wide mysterious world and each other into so many flat, exchangeable commodities, desacralizing and dehumanizing. This lies at the heart of McCarthy’s work. Now, he may be a writer of immense ambition who also admits he "doesn't know how to write women," but to allow that to undermine a deeply necessary work -- that of restoring mystery and pointing out the ways in which we distort it, is well nigh tragic. In his most recent novel, he says as much as "[creation] hummed of mystery," whereas the villian in Blood Meridian perpetuates the distorted view that "there is no mystery." He portrays the effects of this distortion and draws attention to it so that we might learn from it. McCarthy is trying to bring us face to face with who we are and, historically, who we have been. Savagery has been an element of our existence from The Iliad through the Holocaust. Why is that? McCarthy offers some insight. Far from a mere celebration of violence, this attempt to expose its roots is entirely in line with Hungerford’s own interest in genocide, holocaust studies, religion, and social justice. It’s a shame she “failed” to see it. Whether this will all be captured in the upcoming film version is doubtful. That a Yale literature professor missed it highly disappointing.

Poetic rhythms

I'm currently writing a paper on Cormac McCarthy's novel Suttree, tracing Heideggerian notions of truth as aletheia. He literally grounds the weaving of truth, the venturing of art as the setting forth of truth, in the poetic act. For him, ultimate reality consists of ongoing conflict and tensions giving rise to process and reality in its becoming, and poetic language is uniquely capable of manifesting this underlying reality. I'm convinced McCarthy quite consciously pursues this task in his novels. The Mysterium Tremendum of ultimate reality is a revelation of this very unity of surface dualisms. Unlike the Judge from Blood Meridian who suggests "the mystery is that there is no mystery," McCarthy himself has said "the mystery is that we don't perceive the mystery." It is this mystery, uniquely present in poetic language, and its pre-rational way of knowing that gave rise to myth. Enter Robert Graves, whose "White Goddess" I cracked open tonight, and who directly takes me to task as one who participates in and perpetuates the infernal industrial machine, btw, includes the following as his main thesis "The language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry - "true" in the nostalgic modern sense of "the unimprovable original." (9-10). Given my personal history being raised in a Pentecostal church, I found the following further fascinating: "As a popular religious tradition it all but flickered our at the close of the seventeeenth century: and though poetry of a magical quality is still occasionally being written, even in industrialized Europe, this always results from an inspired, almost pathological, reversion to the original language--a wild Pentecostal "speaking in tongues"--rather than from a conscientious study of its grammar and vocabulary. (12) Ah.